R.K. Narayan’s career as a novelist and short story writer spans almost eight decades from Swami and Friends (1935) to Grandmother’s Tale (1992) until his death on 13 May 2001 at the ripe age of 95. His distinctive sense of humour, his trade mark irony, his bemused, ‘knowing,’ ‘overseeing’ perspective, his rootedness in religion and family values and his inescapable capturing of the essence of Indian sensibility—all have been looked at from a refreshingly new perspective, hitherto only partly touched or left unexplored and unattempted. New insights into The Guide, The Maneater of Malgudi, A Tiger for Malgudi, Waiting for the Mahatma, The Dark Room exploit freshly-forged tools of critical analysis—comparative, structural, ‘new historical’, feminist, Bakhtinian, post-colonial and socio-cultural and ethical.
A welcome addition to the extant critical scholarship on R.K. Narayan’s Ouevre.
A lucid discussion of new dimensions in Literary Theory through well-argued, illustrative analysis of popular texts.
A scholarly elucidation of the Sociology of Hinduism as reflected in Popular Fiction.
An indispensable source-book for students, researchers, teachers, scholars in inter-related fields like Literary Criticism, Theory of Literature, Indian Philosophy, Customs and Thought-Patterns, besides Social Anthropology and Sociology.
Dr. M.K. Bhatnagar is Professor, Department of English, M.D. University, Rohtak (Haryana), India. A distinguished scholar and a veteran teacher of more than two decades’ standing, he has been Chairman, Department of English, M.D. University, Rohtak and also Chairman, State Inter-University Common Syllabi Committee in English of Kurukshetra University, Kurukshetra and M.D. University, Rohtak.
Having been selected for the prestigious Commonwealth Academic Staff Fellowship, Professor Bhatnagar has been a U.G.C.-empanelled Resource Person and part of the Guest Faculty at a number of U.G.C-sponsored Refresher Courses for College Lecturers. He has also chaired individual sessions at national seminars. He has been a U.G.C. Fellow at Panjab University, Chandigarh and a U.G.C. Research Associate at University of Poona, Poona. At present, he is engaged in working as Principal Investigator in a Major U.G.C. Project on Indian English Fiction.
Professor Bhatnagar’s publications include, besides a number of research articles in prestigious journals in India and abroad, Political Consciousness in Indian English Writing, Perspectives and The Fiction of Nayantara Sahgal. His areas of interest are : Literary Theory, Comparative Literature, Commonwealth and Indian English Literature and Third World Fiction.
